Of things to come

"Predictions are always difficult, especially when they concern the future" is a quote that is sometimes attributed to Niels Bohr, but which in any case is quite true. Still, I'll hazard a few predictions about what we'll see at this summer's conferences: At ICHEP 2010, we'll see the first results from the LHC, but there will almost certainly be no indications for new physics yet from that direction. The indications of BSM physics will come instead once again from precise measurements in flavour physics, such as the decays of B_s and D_s mesons. At the LATTICE 2010 conference, we'll se further progress in tackling quantities that have been difficult to treat on the lattice so far, but again the most immediately interesting results will likely be those that reduce the statistical and systematic errors on predictions of quantities of relevance to flavour physics. In fact, I'll even dare to suggest that this prevalence of flavour physics results in hinting at, and possibly revealing, BSM physics is a pattern that's likely to extend further into the future. I won't go so far as to suggest that the LHC won't see direct evidence for new physics at some point, but given the uncertain signatures of new physics when taken in conjunction with the difficult nature of the background at a hadron collider I'd expect that we are more likely to see that precise measurements of flavour observables give conclusive evidence of BSM physics than we are to see, say, the direct production and subsequent detection of superpartners at the LHC. But that's just my opinion as a theorist interested in heavy-quark physics, so there may be some wishful thinking involved.